Inès Longevial, World on Paper: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris

World on paper - the skins she inhabits

 

Roland Barthes, 1977 - Fragments of a love speech

 

Ketabi Projects is happy to introduce World on paper, Inès Longevial's third exhibition with the gallery and the first entirely dedicated to the artist's works on paper.  The genius of the artist lies in her ability to lend us her eyes. Inès Longevial does not deviate from the principle by revealing to us, for the time of a visit, the facets, the colored vibrations and the roots of the souls which populate her world.

 

World on paper differs from previous exhibitions in that it is the first time that drawings on paper, the painter's personal shelters which feed her paintings, are exhibited. This regular and secret practice frees itself from any compromise in its chromatic choices, allowing an almost Fauvist treatment of pastel and colored pencil. The artist's gestures pursue a liberating dance to give birth to a more porous and instinctive work.

 

For this exhibition, some of the small formats are assembled to form a whole, a kind of patchwork weaving and linking fragments of portraits. These compositions on several sheets that we will call «puzzle women» seem to be able to change face at the slightest opportunity, as if the caress of our wanderings could directly influence them. The paper is so fine that it seems to be able to stick against our body and it is precisely what it is about here: a chronicle of the skins that the artist inhabits. Against the backdrop of a Pedro Almodóvar-like universe, her skins shine with the memories they hold within them and the seasons that follow one another. The colors shine through the humors as if the epidermis kept in itself the memory of its states.

 

These forests of faces make our heads spin as we end up forgetting the empty background. The only thing that counts is the presence of an encounter which takes place under the protective auspices of butterflies and snakes. We can also anticipate the idea of a future metamorphosis that is foreshadowed here: one sheds its skin, and the other emerges from its chrysalis. These totems are as if charged with a magical thought and reveal the buried power of this Ines with multiple reflections. The approach is frontal. This exposure seems to make the figures stronger: they are aware of their shapes, their contours and above all of their powers. The gaze is resolutely feminine. The body is not sexualized, it is only anchored in the present and determined to shine beyond the roles that society would like to attribute to it.

 

Beyond these symbols, the work of Ines Longevial also summons our childlike spirit or at least the naive and poetic instinct that sometimes fades with the transition to adulthood. With her, and through her eyes, the pastel becomes cream, oil, to turn into an ice cream that would have the delicious taste of a vacation. «I feel like I'm holding back from eating it, from spreading it on myself, I think that if I went beyond a certain degree of madness, I would go that far». (Inès Longevial)

 

Elise Roche

 

 

Born in 1990 in Agen, Inès Longevial works with drawing and painting in resonance with impressions, feelings, sensations from which she naturally extracts her palette. The artist approaches her memories in color and gives form to candid and absorbed faces, which carry the nostalgia of seasons, sunsets, shades of light and caresses. This year, Inès will benefit from a rich program of solo exhibitions in French and international institutions such as FIAF New York, the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Agen (France), or the Korean Museum of Contemporary Art (KMCA) in Seoul.